When he was called out of the room for a minute, my mother said contentedly, ‘A real man of science.’
He then took us on a tour of the clinic. We saw the long rectangular boxes into which the patients were put during their treatment. The temperature inside was then cranked up to a maximum of forty-two degrees centigrade; it was at that temperature, Kloos said, that the protein in cancer cells began to coagulate, while the protein in normal, healthy cells did so only at forty-four degrees. We peeked into a room where a woman was lying on a waterbed.
‘She’s developing an electron field,’ Kloos said.
He stood in the doorway and winked at my mother. I heard him say,‘. . that’s exactly what Rudolf Steiner said, isn’t it?’
Back in his office we waited politely for his tremors — which had started this time in mid-sentence — to end. He resumed, ‘What I can’t tell everyone, but feel comfortable telling you, is that we also accept payment in cash. Off the record, if your insurance won’t cover the treatment.’
We left Cologne and followed the snarl of autobahns. That part of Europe looks, on the map, like the web of veins on an old woman’s leg. From beside me came a voice dipped in the bittersweetness of self-pity.
‘I felt sort of sad last night when you didn’t want to take my arm.’
I said nothing. She said, ‘What I thought was: there will come a day when you’ll get down on your bare knees and beg to be able to still give me your arm.’
Above the fields, the cloud cover roiled, veils of rain hung from the sky.
‘Even in death you still manipulate me,’ I said.
Six disastrous trips to Cologne followed. In addition to the patent agonies of war, torture and famine, there is also the agony of family. Along the high quays of Cologne, above the river that swept deep and wide through its channel, I thought with irksome regularity on the words Randy Newman had written with the Rhine in mind. I’m looking at the river. But I’m thinking of the sea. The first two times I stayed with her during the treatment in the box, that stage prop from the theater of illusionists in which Richard H. Kloos was a player as well. Her head, resting on a towel, was the only thing sticking out of it. I sat in a chair beside her and watched as she was slowly warmed up. Her face grew redder and redder. The sweat poured off her. Sometimes the skepticism and the chill in my soul left, to make way for the irrational hope that this via dolorosa would lead to healing, that it was actually possible. Kloos, after all, had said that fifteen percent of the women who came to him were completely healed by his treatment. Sixty percent showed partial remission, and twenty-five percent died anyway. One hundred percent of everyone who came here tried to wriggle their way into that fifteen percent. They all did their best. Belief was the most important condition. Anyone who did not believe had given up all hope of being healed and was lost. And so they believed, the women I saw shuffling down the hall, skinny and exhausted in their fluffy bathrobes, they believed in the magic power of dendritic cells and the magic hand of Dr. Richard H. Kloos, the mediator between life and death. They believed in the face of everything, in order to win a place in the Lucky Fifteen. I dabbed at her face with a cloth, which I had to change for another after the second time, so freely did the sweat run.
At one point she wept silently, tears mingled with the sweat. I laid my hand for a moment on her forehead, the soaked hair, and said everything would be all right. Thin, stupid comfort. A formula with no heart. Through her exhaustion I saw, for the first time, traces of fear in her eyes, like a horse sinking into quicksand. The mammal’s fear of life going on without it, while it disappears into ultimate darkness. Suddenly these torments no longer constituted the road to healing, but the gates to the unspeakable suffering that awaited; tears dripped onto the towel. I raised the straw to her lips, she sucked water from the cup.
The third time we went she said she would rather have a nurse beside her.
‘I can do it from now on without you there,’ she said. ‘I sort of know what’s coming. I’d rather have someone there who’s giving it their full attention. I had to ask you to wipe my face the whole time. You had such a cold look in your eye. You made me feel kind of dirty.’
Shortly after the first treatment at Dr. Kloos’s clinic, a woman who had become my mother’s special friend in adversity died. Her breast had been amputated, the cancer had returned after a few years, she had been living off an outside chance. My mother went to her funeral. When she came back she said she wanted to be cremated. She repeated her phrase about not planning to die soon, but still. . What she really wanted was to be burnt on a wooden platform on the banks of the Ganges, but she didn’t want to force that kind of logistical feat on me.
She was waiting for a miracle. Dr. Kloos may not have healed her, yet still she felt a part of that sixty percent, the ones who exhibited partial response. There were new miracle makers, whom she referred to as physicians and scientists, one of whom lived in the woods in Drenthe Province. He said, ‘Marthe, it’s one minute to twelve. You have to start working on loving yourself, on your self-appreciation, right now. It’s not too late.’
I asked her what he had promised.
‘Does he say the cancer will go away by taking a rest, by meditating, by loving yourself?’
‘It’s possible to program yourself at the cellular level, that’s all he says. Rather than cutting everything away, he goes to the root of the disease.’
‘And that’s how he heals people?’
‘He’s actually very modest. He says it’s possible, not that it always happens. You’re in control of so much yourself.’
The healers who seemed most credible, it struck me, were those who admitted they were not perfect. Precisely by not being perfect, by leaving a wide margin for failure, they allowed for the possibility of being healed.
An older woman, living in a holiday cottage with a canary. Sometimes, on the street or in a restaurant, the whispers and the turned heads were a reminder of the life that had gone before. Now she was back where her life had started, Bourtange was just down the road. She had made a long journey, at the end of it she had come home; to get there all she had to do was cross what they once called the Bourtanger Moor. Aunt Edith, Uncle Gerard, we hadn’t talked about them since, we didn’t know whether they still lived there, whether they were still alive. The rupture had been resolute and irrevocable. The circle had been closed to her. By moving to Meeden she had sought rapprochement, as unemphatically as possible. If asked, she would have denied it.
She did not go back to the oncological surgeon.
‘Why would I do that?’ she said. ‘It’s going fine this way, isn’t it?’
‘You promised you would.’
‘It has to have a purpose. I don’t see the use of it.’
She drifted further and further away, increasingly beyond the reach of common sense — she created her own good-luck rituals and found comfort with faith healers and anthroposophists, with the sorcerers. With their lips they claimed to have no intention of luring her away from regular medicine, but supported her in every decision that boiled down to exactly that. Fearing the law, their occult message was dissipated through subterranean vents, the sermons-in-the-field of the natural healers; they were slippery as eels in wet grass. I did not believe their intentions were malevolent. That would have been easier to take, criminal intent, hurting the other in order to reap profit for one’s self. I would have understood such intentions; after all, there are enough people like that. The audacity lay in the fact that they truly believed that their laying on of hands, their home-brewed medicines, their signposts to spiritual transformation would make the cancer go away. Brazen claims, cloaked in false modesty and a humbly stammered who am I that I should be given this gift? The ill person, that weakened, halting organism, suddenly robbed of the health which it had always enjoyed so lightheartedly, is incapable of sealing the breaches. As a result, unfounded messages of hope and comfort come rolling in.